For all the hype, tension and the dreaded presence of several cynics among the audience, last weekend’s important consultation meeting regarding the use of imported English words in the Maltese language turned out to be a highly satisfactory occasion. The National Council for the Maltese Language and the four protagonists of the day – Minister Evarist Bartolo, council president Ray Fabri and two of our top linguists, Prof. Albert Borg and Dr George Farrugia – deserve all the accolades they got. Suddenly, the future no longer looks as bleak as it did just a few months ago.
One should be clear from the outset that during this long period of indecision and personal pique, the national language has not been in the doldrums. Today, it is in a much healthier state than other small languages all over the world, thousands of which are currently threatened with extinction. This is because our language, as is in its very nature, has over the centuries been able to feed off other prevailing languages to grow, flourish and diversify with an ease that other, more pedantic and less elastic languages, could not muster.
Only in this way can a language survive in the foreseeable future. This same transmutation is happening to other, much bigger languages as a result of the 21st century electronic hurricane enveloping the world via the internet and other instant information sources. It is not a unique occurrence for the languages of the world – Latin, French, Spanish and UK English have all been generational “flavours of the month” – but this one we’re living is greater and relentlessly so. Like it or not and certainly not in our lifetime or even our children’s, the world is moving towards one common language, not necessarily American English, but possibly. It could even be Mandarin for all I know.
What has been described by many as “a breakthrough, at last” has actually taken seven years in coming. One would think that is a long time, but similar instances concerning less draconian changes in other languages have sometimes taken a lot more. Certainly the required moratorium, I was duly informed during the workshop I attended in the same consultation meeting last week, for such changes to be assimilated and put into regulated use by writers, journalists, broadcasters, scholars, students and publishers often takes much longer. In the case of just one redundant accent in French, for example, there was a 20-year moratorium. The last time we had a batch of changes and grammatical adoptions, we had a two-year moratorium that was deemed too short by most people, particularly the publishers who had to carry out a cull of thousands of printed books to avoid breaking the law.
While the proposed changes still need to be re-assessed and the final decisions announced, hopefully the whole process will finally, and soon, get under way, there is still the obvious question on many people’s minds: wherefore the Maltese language? The main reasoning behind it is that since many languages face an uncertain future, why should one really bother with changes, updates and their continued protection?
The truth is, however, that languages, those that are used and practised by the majority as is the case with Maltese, prove, provide and maintain national identities. It is ironic, in fact, that while it is agreed by most experts that small, and even the great, languages look destined to being spiralled down into one black hole in the very distant future, the issues of nationality and nationalism have resurfaced with a vengeance.
It is a distrustful reawakening that takes Europe, for example, back to a pre-WWII scenario. The whole Brexit extravaganza was another such rude indication of the resurgence of the extreme-Right, as are the electoral tremors occurring elsewhere in Europe, particularly Germany, Austria, Italy, Scandinavia and Eastern European countries that seem so happy to replace the old Iron Curtain with a wall of their own to keep the desperate, the suffering and the hopeful away from their borders.
I am not in any way equating the use and upholding of a national language with extreme rightism, but simply balancing it with linguistic realities. The use, upgrading and protection of our own national language are instigated by virtue of cultural heritage and the fact that the influx of English words into Maltese is being recognised and positioned there with a mixture of practicality and compromise, is a feather in the nation’s cap.
It is no longer a question of wherefore, but more of a realisation that offers both continuity and growth, with future generations the obvious priority.
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Untimely indignation
I am certainly not against the discussion of sensitive issues that crop up with almost monotonous regularity in society. What irks me is that in this country we have to take them up literally decades after they’ve been analysed, assessed, killed and buried elsewhere in the civilized world. The civil marriage and divorce debates were two major examples of this aptitude to delay things that are not only needed but also considered an individual’s right.
There were times, and we’re not going back to the Middle Ages, when even the very mention of the word contraceptives was likely to lead to a long-winded polemic over which one’s final destination hovered seriously and conspicuously between heaven and hell!
We are now suffering the untimely indignation of yet another hot debate on what is known as “the morning after pill”, which is merely an emergency contraception, a birth control measure that can be used after sexual intercourse to prevent pregnancy. And again, the so-called pro-lifers and the holier-than-thou brigade have come out screaming against something which is already so easily available on the web. One click and it’s on your doorstep.
Very much in the style of the worst Brexit campaigning of recent days, they have even brought in the “abortion” and “rape” factors into the whole discussion when abortion is not only irrelevant in this case but also, at least until now, an agreed no-no among the two major Maltese political parties, while to connect rape with the use of the morning after pill is again blaming women for rightly taking things into their hands (no pun intended) in what is still practically a man’s world.
While the Labour parliamentary group is scheduled to discuss the issue as if the whole future of our sanctimonious archipelago depended on this insignificant little pill, there has not been much coming from the Nationalist Opposition side. Where do they stand on this one? Hopefully the silence is only because they rightly do not consider the issue as important, even if, surprise, utter shock and disbelief, the Bishops have spoken against.
Meanwhile, one assumes that the women of Malta and Gozo just have to wait it out with abated breath and suppressed libido.